Project Photofly

A few weeks back Autodesk Labs released Project Photofly – a free tool that uses photogrammetry to automatically construct a 3D model of your subject in the cloud and then send it back to you. Simply by taking photographs of an object from multiple angles a triangulated 3D mesh can be created, the photos are stitched into one or more textures and a rough real-time model is provided for approval and basic editing before submission to the cloud for high res mesh generation (usually a model of about 500k triangles). The resulting textured mesh can be viewed in the included Photo Scene Editor or exported to a 3D editor in numerous formats. Decent results can be obtained by using about 50 photographs and the results seem to be pretty robust. With some retopology and render to texture, this method of mesh capturing could prove useful for game art, as Joseph Drust shows here:

About me

Hey! I’m a Senior Designer/3D Generalist with an Emmy award-winning technology company, with over 14 years experience in the Irish games industry. I’ve also done some TV work at a twice Oscar nominated animation studio.